“The Muse Calls Me from the Airport”
Collaborators’ Q&A
What inspired you to bring your work to Broadsided?
Poet Catherine Bull: I love the idea of art in conversation with other art. And art in public spaces. I am SO EXCITED that my poem was chosen!
What drew you to create a visual response to this poem, in particular?
Artist Zehra Khan: The swearing. And the worship of the honey.
How did this poem come to be?
Poet Catherine Bull: I wrote the first draft in 2020 during an early pandemic online zoom workshop. I don’t remember the prompt exactly, but I wasn’t liking what I was writing for it, so I flipped something about the prompt (maybe it was to write about a real person and I made it an imaginary person, something like that) and that got to the idea of a muse, and then to a muse who is gonna need to kick my ass a little bit.
How did this image come to be?
Artist Zehra Khan: In 2003, I drew my friends’ eyes flanked by with blown ink – in my mind god-rays, or possibly veils, or hijab. I cut out several of the eyes, layering them on painted paper and scraps of dyed bedsheets. The bedazzled shoelace is something my beloved put together when playing with my art materials – something I never would have done – and was utterly charmed by.
What did you think an artist would pick up on from your poem? Does the artist’s response make you see the poem differently?
Poet Catherine Bull: I had no idea if it would be figurative or abstract. The collage really fits with all the repetition in the poem!
What question would you like to ask your collaborator?
Poet to Artist: How did your understanding/impression of the poem change from first reading, through creation of the art, to seeing them together?
Artist Zehra Khan: Answer to come.
Artist to Poet: Catherine, did you have a work of art or artist in mind for the line “oil-painting god-rays”?
Poet Catherine Bull: Just Renaissance religious paintings in general with the lines of light coming through clouds, which make me think of seeing the real-life phenomenon of light shooting through the clouds in that way sometimes on the coast in the Pacific Northwest, which makes me think of the paintings, and so on.
Did anything shift for you or come into new light as you began working on your visual response?
Artist Zehra Khan: Since this was a collage I laid out and was taking a photograph of the quality of light or flash changed the mood and look of the piece considerably.
Have you ever written work that has been inspired by visual art?
Poet Catherine Bull: Yes, though not always successfully from paintings or sculptures. It’s something I come back to regularly but struggle with. I do however have an unpublished chapbook of poems called “Rambo/Rimbaud” which mix up the Stallone ’80s movies and work by the 19th century bad-boy French poet, and I’ve written a few other poems inspired by films and TV shows. (I’m not saying Rambo III is “art”, but film is a visual art, so I think it counts for this question!)
Describe your dream “Vectorization”—where, in your wildest dreams, would you most like to see this broadside posted in the world?
Poet Catherine Bull: The exit of airports, near the Uber/taxi queues.
Artist Zehra Khan: In an airport bathroom.
When you consider the full folio of work from this issue, what questions, observations, or connections arise for you?
Artist Zehra Khan: I was particularly interested in the edges of the artwork and how that correlated with the text fields.
Poet Catherine Bull: Range–the range of characters, metaphors, visual art styles, colors, etc.
If this Broadsided collaboration were a type of weather, what would it be?
Poet Catherine Bull: Petrichor.
Artist Zehra Khan: Crisp summer day with unpredictable gusty wind.
Do you have a favorite, generative prompt for artists or writers you’d like to share?
Artist Zehra Khan: Create with the “wrong” materials.
Poet Catherine Bull: Take some non-fiction books and flip around in them looking for lists in a sentence (for example, “applied, stuck on, removable” and “scientific, philosophical, and utilitarian” from Chromophobia by David Batchelor and “soirees, servants, and supper parties” and “apricot, mauve, pink, pale turquoise, grey and red” from Threads of Life by Clare Hunter). Get about 10-12 of these lists from various books, removed from their context, and type them out on a page with a blank line in between each one. Print it out, then write your own poem lines in the blank spaces. You can be in conversation with the lists, or use them in metaphors, or whatever you like. You might wind up keeping the poem with the lists in, or see what the poem is like with just the blank-space lines, the lists removed. Lots of possibilities.
Read any good books lately?
Poet Catherine Bull: Yes! Just finished Helm by Sarah Hall. Saw it on the Staff Recommends shelf at Queen Anne Book Co. in Seattle and was hooked by the end of the second paragraph. It’s an amazing read.
Artist Zehra Khan: Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle by Mary Heaton Vorse. A quote from the book, “ In front of the bank I saw Jerry Tate and a bunch of young men about his own age. Jerry has a brain, from which comes insecurity. He reads books. He likes talk. He loves ideas. He loves to get tight. He has never worked hard at anything. He feels himself superior to the towns people and inferior to the summer people. So he is neither flesh nor fowl.”
Seen any good art lately?
Poet Catherine Bull: Yes! At the Tacoma Art Museum, in their current exhibit of works from their collection, the sketches of Ralph Pugay stood out to me in particular.
Artist Zehra Khan: Barely Fair in Chicago exhibits miniature, 1:12 scale contemporary art in small 20” booths. Operated by the Julius Caesar collective, it features local and international galleries exhibiting their work in miniature. One of my favorite artists, Chicago weaver k.g., had several pieces in one of the booths.